Mobile Advertising: A Growing Opportunity for Small Businesses

Modern consumers are smart, social, and increasingly mobile. With over one billion smartphones used every single day, the reach that your business can achieve with a successful mobile advertisement is like nothing we’ve seen before.

Over 91.4 million Americans own a smartphone, with 89 percent of owners actively using their phones throughout the day. Smartphone users are, on the whole, young, affluent, and responsive to advertising – for many businesses, an ideal demographic.

Given the rapid growth of mobile advertisingAdvertising delivered through mobile devices, including display ads, search ads, and social media ad... and the huge reach that’s available to advertisers, you might be surprised to learn that mobile advertising is wide open as a marketing medium.

Because of the rapid growth of the smartphone industry and the massive number of mobile users, opportunities for mobile advertisers are growing as the industry gets bigger and bigger. Impressions, now highly competitive in online display and search advertising, are becoming available in higher and higher numbers.

Businesses that invest in mobile advertising today have a huge range of options at their disposal. These options include:

• Mobile searchUsing a mobile device to conduct internet searches. advertising, using services like Google Adwords and Yahoo.
• Mobile display advertising, using services like Google Display Network and InMobi.
• Mobile social advertising, using Facebook’s wide range of mobile advertising solutions.
• In-app advertisingAds displayed within a mobile application, such as banners or interstitials., using banner advertisements and alerts to market to users as they use smartphone applications.

Talk about versatility. Every aspect of the PC advertising ecosystem is available on mobile, along with a few unique options. The wide range of ad options that mobile offers is a huge benefit for online advertisers, who can easily port over campaigns from PC-based display, search, and social advertising networks.

As well as its incredible versatility, mobile advertising offers some unique benefits for advertisers that, in many cases, simply aren’t available with traditional display, search, and social ads. These benefits include:

1.  The ability to target users based on their mobile handset and operating system. Instead of using keywordsWords or phrases that users type into search engines to find information. and location data, advertisers can target their ads to display only for iPhone, Samsung, or HTC users.

This gives advertisers the ability to tweak their spending on a handset or operating system basis. Got a product that iPhone users will love? Using handset-based bidding, you can market it exclusively to them.

2.  The ability to target users that have displayed interest in your product or service before, while they’re on the move. Using retargetingAdvertising that targets users who have previously visited a website or interacted with a brand. systems, advertisers can reach their prospects while they use a mobile device.

Run a restaurant in your city? Instead of marketing to users while they’re at home, make a connection with your potential customers while they’re out of the house to easily close the deal.

3.  The ability to let users immediately download a new mobile application. One of the biggest benefits of mobile advertising is that it allows users to access apps with ‘one touch’ – a single step from clicking an ad to downloading an app.

The mobile advertising ecosystem is constantly growing, with more users switching over to smartphones every single day. With billions of ad impressions available each and every day, will your business capitalize on the huge reach of mobile advertising, or will it continue to focus on crowded, ultra-competitive forms of advertising?